Ice Dragon Art WIP's
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Great render! It is very colorful. :)
Yes, yes it is lol.
Love the rich hilights in the blanket there in the last render. Good work!
Thank you very much!
I love the textures on this version of Jepe's Bedding. I'm looking forward to getting them when I can. I'm behind getting a couple of his latest products. I love your promo image. :)
Thanks! He has gorgeous stuff!
This is a nice alternative way to use backgrounds. Instead of adding it in photoshop (which I do a lot but sometimes, I like to try something else) I added it in the environment tab in Daz. This does take away my abilitiy to add layers behind my model but in this case, I wasn't planning anything major since the star of hte show is background. This one worked perfectly, they don't always line up right or stretch out and get pixelated etc. depending on the size the originals are.
That's very lovely. Is the figure the only object in the scene? I assume the lights in her hands are postwork. Are the other lights part of the background?
(As for the Environment tab, personally, I think it's overdue for an overhaul. I've been happier using a plane in the background, using the image in both the Base Color and Emissive settings, with just enough luminance for the image to look correct in the render. Then I can move it suit my needs.)
You are absolutely correct, the character is the only thing physically present lol. Most of the fairy light are actually part of the background I added just a couple to her hands and one or two other spots. I agree with you on the evironment tab, I find it rare to find something that fits so well and I have also used a plane on a number of occasions. Lately, I tend to just do them in postwork and be done with it
For those who don't know, if you render as a PNG file and turn draw dome OFF and draw ground ON, you will get a transparent background with ground shadows. This allows you to use any HDRI's lighting without having hte background show up.
An image added to the Backdrop setting in the Environment tab has to have the same aspect ratio as the camera dimensions or DS will distort it to fit that ratio. And the image is always facing the camera, dead on, which isn't always the right angle for the scene. Very limiting, but it can be a quick way to add a background, in some circumstances.
I frequently render with the dome off, but there are times when that actually can cause problems. Do you remember when V8 first came out, and there was a thread in The Commons about the eyes and white spots? What looks like white spots during the render are really transparent pixels and I've seen this problem in many renders, not just G8 eyes. I''ve since read this is a known bug having something to do with SSS...? Anyway, I've found the problem goes away if Draw Dome is on. (Of course, this is only in the Dome environment settings.)
I did not know that was the cause of those weird spots lol. I do far prefer to do most of my backgrounds in photoshop at the moment, at least for promo work. My personal work, I like to use full sets etc. because well, that is why I bought them lol. It is nice to have different options and hopefully, at some point, they will improve the environment tab and make it more functional as far as being able to position it etc. We shall see lol.
Okay I promised I would show a bit of my process in photoshop. This isn't a tutorial by any means just a basic idea of how I work when doing postwork. There can be less (doesn't happen often lol) or a (lot) more layers depending on the project.
The very first thing I do is make a duplicate layer and lock the bottom layer. Then save under a different name than the original file. That way, I never lose my original. Locking the first layer means I don't accidentally make changes to the base file. Its mostly for my peace of mind becasue I can and have totally messed that up.
Next, I created a tranparent new layer and added a slightly lighter brush stroke over all of the electronics in the appropriate color. So orange on orange, red on red, yellow on yellow etc. A bit time consuming and it looks weird right now but that's okay. Then I set that layer to overlay, which makes everything look a bit like its glowing instead of being just a flat button.
The next layer is my dodge and burn layer. This is what I use to bring out highlights or darken shadows or brighten or darken mid tones etc. Mostly brighten highlights and darken shadows those. I set this to a very small percentage of opacity, its very very easy to overdue, so I prefer to go over what I am working on several times at a low opacity. I almost always do the eyes to help them really stand out. Less is more here. I also dodged part of her dress, her hair, and the rim lighting on her
This one looks awful at the moment. I brought in a texture and dropped it on top. Then I started working my way down the filters until I found one I liked. And yes, I go through every single filter in the drop down box for almost every texture. You never know which one is going to work for what you are doing.
So, once I decided on which texture and layer effect I wanted I added a layer mask to the texture. This allows me to mask out anything I don't want to be covered by the texture. Keep in mind that you can set your brush less than 100% and you can then control how much of the effect you want to remove and on what part of the render you want to remove it on. A lot of times I will mask out the effect almost entirely on a face or important element and then change the opacity to a lower level and partionally mask out other parts. This can create a great deal of depth. Anyway, this particular texture was used to give the console etc a bit more of a beat up look so it didn't look super shiny and new. As you can see, you can still see the texture on her leg etc. That was all removed with a layer mask. Layer masks are awesome, they are none destructive, so if you color outside the lines, you just switch your color swatch to white and it paints it all back in again. You will be able to see in the next screenshot, that the white layer mask has black in the shape of the the girl.
Once I am totally done with my layers and textures I may or may not take it into Nik Filters or a different effects program. I also use Filter Forge, Topaz Studios and Lightroom.
As you can see there are a TON of options lol. And most of those options have options.
You can compare your original (the one you imported from Photoshop or Gimp) to see the effect of the filter.
So here is the original and the final version. This one has a fairly small amount of layers, I can easily do two, three or four times the amount of layers for one piece. For some reason the forums won't let me load the original original at the moment, I will switch them out once it sorts itself.
Thank you. This is highly enlightening! I do a lot with layers, too. Just never tried to use them so creatively.
Now I think I need to give some creative postwork a try!
Welcome! I play a lot with opacity levels. Even the weirdest effects can be used in an interesting manner if the opacity is changed. And learning about masking layers was a total game changer for me.
Thank you very much. Very generous of you to share, and much appreciated.
Very nice tutorial, and the result is very convincing as well, the only thing lacking is that "thing" in her ear :D
I read your post work process with interest, @IceDragonArt. I hadn' thought of using a texture that way, although I should have. I've seen it done before. But I don't think I'll forget to use that trick going forwards. I am curious about how you do the dodge and burn layer. Is it one layer? What do you set the layer effect to. I've seen where they create a 50 per cent gray layer and set it to multiply and then use it to paint in the shadows And then I think they set the other layer to Overlay (or was it screen) and then paint in the highlights. Is that what you do?
The final product looks really good.
Thanks everyone!
Diomede, considering all the help I've gotten from everyone in the forums its the least I can do lol.
Linwelly, you are right but I do not have one of those earpieces lol. That would have put the final touch on it.
KenvinH, for the dodge and burn I make a copy layer so I don't ruin any previous work and if I decide I don't like it I can just delete it and start over. If I think I have a lot to do I will do them on separate layers. You can do it with a grayscale layer, I don't usually, unless I have a bigger project going, for the promo's its usually just a quick touch up to bring certain things out. For that, I leave it on normal layer setting and set my opacity on my brush down to 5-10 percent and go over it several times to get the strength I want.
terrific piece
Thank you!
Great work, and you've been busy! In this past year alone, I've seen so much improvement in your rendering/setting up/lighting skills.
Thank you very much! I feel like I hit a tipping point where I finally started to really understand some of how it works. Still lots to learn but I'm pretty excited with how things are going!
I love the little look into your process. Very cool. Great image, too. I agree with @DarwinsMishap, your art has seen a lot of improvement over the last year. :)
Thank you!
You have come a long way in such a short time Sonja, you are so much futher then even I am!!!
I have enjoyed watching you grow as a 3D artist over the past couple of years.
I know I still have so much to learn about postwork I wish there was more video tutorials for GIMP as aposed to PDF Tutorials because with rasing my 3 Grandbabies right now it is so hard to find time for reading them, rendering the subject of the tutorials, etc.....So for me it would be so much easier to watch a video and work on the project at the same time.
That's actually the way I prefer it as well, unfortunately I am totally unfamiliar with Gimp. I've never tried doing a video and honestly, wouldn't even know where to begin.
And thank you very much! I think we have all grown quite a bit!
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